A history of Japanese illustration (三)

The Edo period saw momentous changes in Japanese art as development of woodblock printing methods allowed for reproduction of images on a scale unthinkable in previous eras. The concurrent economic changes provided a rising middle class market to accompany the nobility who had traditionally sponsored the arts; as the field started to move towards mass market consumerism, Japanese artists began to adopt a far greater illustrative range than ever before. A heavily stylised genre that produced scenes ranging from the common and the vulgar (scenes of drunkenness, trickery and prostitution drawing heavily on the thematic influences of the kabuki genre it so often depicted) to the fantastical (an epic battle consisting of a troop of anthropomorphic vegetables fighting to the death against an army of sword-wielding octopus), ukiyo-e chronicled human - and occasionally not entirely human - behaviour in all its vain glory.

Where once faces in paintings appeared as static as their noh theatre counterparts who wore masks throughout a performance, they now featured more outlandish expressions and exaggerated poses, paving the way for some of the anime and manga norms of today while retaining the comparative lack of detail and features that has many other contemporary illustrators.

However, Japanese reverence for tradition ensured familiar themes were not jettisoned, but the imagery beefed up, as seen in perhaps the country’s most famous work, Hokusai’s “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa”. Mountains, seas and other elements of nature remained firmly in the illustrative canon but became more dynamic forces, as if to keep pace with their human counterparts. Hokusai not only produced the country’s most iconic work, his approach epitomises the Japanese artisan’s awareness of their own imperfection and unrelenting pursuit of improvement; already an old man, he claimed that:

“from the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account.

At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further;

At ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine.

When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own.”

His works also feature in the canon of an important subsection of ukiyo-e: the erotic “spring pictures” known as shunga. The history of Japanese sexuality differs greatly from both its Western peers, where prescriptive religions preached sinfulness and shame, and its Asian neighbours who absorbed Confucian principles of chastity and marital propriety to a far greater extent. The naked body was less sexualised - it was on constant display at the communal bathing areas throughout the country - and not considered shameful; indeed, genitalia continue to feature prominently in symbols, charms and festivals to celebrate fertility.

This carried over to shunga works, which featured relatively little nudity, but emphasised and exaggerated the sexual organs. Subject matter that was considered obscene in other cultures faced far less judgement as sexuality and morality enjoyed a far looser relationship in the popular mind. Homosexual acts were widely accepted, indeed they played an important role in the religious and military history of Japan as sexual bonding between older monks and samurai and their young proteges was considered desirable. Gender ambiguity was celebrated in the country’s traditional performing arts as female roles in noh and kabuki productions were the exclusive domain of always male and often effeminate bishonen actors. Prostitutes were spared the moral judgements of other cultures and presented as glamourous and refined, the Hollywood stars of their day. Images that would be regarded as bestiality elsewhere drew on popular sources such as the mythical kappa, a fastidiously polite creature that was nonetheless prone to engaging in human rape.

The spread of foreign influence in the realms of all aspects of life in the second half of the 19th century signalled the end for shunga; in its quest to appear respectable in front of its new international peers the government cracked down hard on it, along with other traditional “indecent” practices such as mixed-gender bathing. A short era of repression however was no match for centuries of ingrained sensibilities, and artists’ post-WWII rejection of Imperial Japanese standards paved the way for some of the hyper-sexualised elements of Japanese illustration today.